mischief is to come of it?"

"Oh! let's go back and call the police," urged the baker, in a tremulous
gurgle.

"Too late!" returned Riley. "It is given to me to see the burglars. They
are inside. They are taking the silver out of the closet. There will be
murder in five minutes."

"If there must be murder, why, of course we ought to have a hand in it,"
I suggested. "Our motives at least will be good."

"Right!" said Riley. "Come on, brethren! We must prove our faith by our
works."

But the baker hung back in a most dough-faced fashion, while the butcher
and the candlestick-maker encouraged him in his cowardice. At last it
was agreed that this unheroic trio should wait in the yard as a reserve,
while Riley, the Doctor, and I went in to worry the burglars. Leaving
the weaker brethren in a clump of evergreen shrubbery, we, the
forlorn-hope, stole around the house to get at a back-door which Prophet
Riley had plainly seen in his dream, and which he foretold us we should
find unlocked. I was not much amazed to discover a back-door, inasmuch
as most houses have one, but I really was surprised to learn that it was
unfastened. My astonishment at this circumstance, however, was over-
balanced by my alarm at finding that the Doctor still persisted in his
intention of entering; for I had hoped that at the last moment his
faith would give way, and let him slide down from the elevation of his
ridiculous and reckless purpose.

"But you are not really going in?" I whispered, jerking at his
coat-tails.

"Certainly," he replied. "The robbers are surely there. The door was
unlocked."

"Mere carelessness of the servants. Stop! Come back! Nonsense! Madness!
You'll get into a scrape. Respectable family. Good gracious, what a pack
of fools!"

While I was rapidly muttering these observations, he was pulling away
from me and stealing into the house after his prophet. Finding that
there was no stopping him, I followed, in obedience, perhaps, to that
great and no doubt beneficent, but as yet unexplained, instinct which
causes sheep to leap after their bellwether. We were in a basement, or
semi-subterranean story. I felt the walls of a narrow passage on
either side of me, and can swear to a kitchen near by, for I smelt its
cooking-range. I walked on the foremost end of my toes, and would have
paid five dollars for a pair of list slippers. Rather than take another
such little promenade as I had in that passage, I would submit to be
p